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Digital Passport is a great way to teach digital citizenship in 3rd through 6th-grade classrooms. It provides a foundation for appropriate and safe online behavior by offering fun and interactive lessons and meets Common Core and ISTE Nets Standards. Students can engage in videos, games, and quizzes about cyber-bullying, respect, digital literacy, and many other topics to promote digital citizenship. The site offers educator materials that can be utilized by simply registering for a login and password. Both students and teachers can access Digital Passport on computers, tablets, or phones in school and at home. The application can be accessed directly through the website or downloaded. One way to implement this tool in lessons is to allow students to have the opportunity to work on Chrome books or in a lab. Students can be assigned quizzes through the teacher dashboard. Once students get through the lessons, they earn badges and a "Certificate of Achievement," which allows for positive reinforcement. Teachers can monitor student progress during the activity and print reports to share with each student, their parents, and administrators. During lessons, students can be assigned to work individually on a device or as a class on a smart board, which allows for an exciting and innovative way to learn about digital citizenship.

Viber is a free application that allows you send texts and make calls to your students and their parents and encourages students to communicate and coordinate their school work. For example, when working on group assignments, students can create their own group to decide on team roles, plan their work, and arrange any meeting times. In addition, teachers can create a class or parent group to send out notices, remind students about deadlines, and share information.

Poetry can and should be an important part of our daily lives. Poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race. By just spending a few minutes reading a poem each day, new worlds can be revealed.

This parent-teacher communication app offers the texting features of Remind.com plus classroom calendars, a meeting scheduler, volunteer tracking, and more. Parents can also communicate with one another, and can consult a mini social-media feed incorporating everything going on with the group. Upload photos, videos, or documents. Bloomz is particularly well-suited to elementary school classes. Private, secure, easy, and fun.

Although QR codes have long since lost their shiny, new glow, the technology hasn't lost its value in education. The rise of one-to-one computing and bring-your-own-device programs in K-12 schools means students access digital learning tools more than ever before.

The Comic Creator invites students to compose their own comic strips for a variety of contexts (prewriting, pre- and postreading activities, response to literature, and so on). The organizers focus on the key elements of comic strips by allowing students to choose backgrounds, characters, and props, as well as to compose related dialogue (shown at left). This versatile tool can be used by students from kindergarten through high school, for purposes ranging from learning to write dialogue to an in-depth study of a formerly neglected genre. The tool is easy to use, made even easier with the Comic Strip Planning Sheet, a printable PDF that comic creators can use to draft and revise their work before creating and printing their final comics. After completing their comic, students have the ability to print out and illustrate their final versions for feedback and assessment.

Problems Worth Solving Discovery Education accelerates school districts' digital transition through comprehensive standards-based content, professional development, formative assessment, and community engagement proven to positively impact student achievement. A digital textbook series, built from scratch for today's learners and current standards, engages students with dynamic, multimodal content and an inquiry approach.

Blogs and websites for teachers, students, and schools

Short Description: economics-games.com allows students to run simulations and make decisions as a market participant. A student may elect to play a solo game or a multi-player game, selecting from a variety of economic topics such as fixed costs, monopoly, competition, and prisoner's dilemma (to name only a few). Depending on the game, students are initially presented with certain data/information and must submit decisions based on what is provided. Once the student (or each player) makes a decision, the student is directed to a results page which can then be discussed with the teacher and/or as a class. Example of Uses: As an aspiring high school Social Studies teacher with a background in Economics, this seems like a great tool to use to supplement the introduction of economic/business terms and concepts. In the classroom, students can learn definitions and principles (i.e., the "Who", "What", "Where", "When"); in the simulations/games, students experience and demonstrate the practical application of such terms to understand the "How" and "Why". In this context, critical thinking skills are used to assess the information provided and arrive at a well-reasoned decision. Such skills are further developed as the students and teacher engage in a discussion about the rationale and impact of the choices of the student(s), without, of course, the pressure of real world economic consequences. With an often dry topic as Economics, this tech tool also seems like an effective way to keep a class interested and engaged with material. Perhaps bonus points could be offered to students who yield good results in their simulation and can support their decision-making with strong arguments. The obvious limitation is that this particular tech tool is designed for one subject. However, similar simulations and educational role-playing games exist for other content areas. In any case, the simulation or game should present information to the s

Hall offers a detailed theoretical and semiotic analysis of the processes by which messages are encoded into media by the creators and decoded by the consumers. He provides a vocabulary for naming the different phases of message production and reception, and a theoretical framework for understanding how they operate. While this text might be considered too dense for many high school students, the ideas themselves are not, and a shared familiarity with these ideas creates a firm foundation on which to build future discussions of how media operates and how to discern even the most deeply coded messages and biases.

Short Description: Seesaw is an educational tool that allows teachers to maintain a digital portfolio of student work, as well as deliver differentiated assignments to specific students. Additionally, the teachers can provide feedback on submitted work and students can submit their work/assignments with text or video comments (typically reflections). The tool also comes with the feature of enabling the sharing of these portfolios with parents of the students. With teacher monitoring and approval, parents can gain access to their child's work to track academic progress, view the teacher's feedback, and contribute commentary of their own to the submissions. Examples of Uses: Teachers can use Seesaw to collect digital files throughout the school year as opposed to a pile of papers. In this sense, Seesaw is effective for both organization and communication. By sharing a student's digital portfolio with the parents, this serves as an effective way to preemptively prevent the need for parent-teacher conferences. Through Seesaw, parents are able to monitor what has been submitted and can also view what the teacher has evaluated or commented upon. In doing so, they can easily determine where their child needs improvement or support. This knowledge and method of communication can lend itself to early solutions before a deficient or underachieving academic situation develops.